Beyond Mobile: Making Sense of a Post-PC World

Native applications are a remnant of the Jurassic period of computer history. We will look back on these past 10 years as the time we finally grew out of our desktop mindset and started down the path of writing apps for an infinite number of platforms. As the cost of computation and connectivity plummets, manufacturers are going to put ‘interactivity’ into every device. Some of this will be trivial: my power adaptor knows it’s charging history. Some of it will be control related: my television will be grand central for my smart home. But at it’s heart, we’ll be swimming in world where every device will have ‘an app’. What will it take for us to get here, what technologies will it take to make this happen?

This talk will discuss how the principles of the open web must apply not only to prototocols but to hardware as well. How can we build a ‘DNS for hardware’ so the menagerie of devices has a chance for working together?

Scott Jenson used to work at Apple, developing the Human Interface guidelines and working on the Newton, no less. He also worked at Symbian and Google so he knows all about mobile devices of all kinds.

Scott is currently Creative Director at Frog Design where he has been writing about the coming zombie apocalypse.